2024-03-29: The Second Step

• Cutscene: The Second Step
• Cast: Cascade Vermilion
• Where: Cascade and Shari's Apartment
• Date: Sometime in Late December, UC 0098
• Summary: Cascade finds the next step on her journey.

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Cascade let herself in quietly, closing the door behind her without a sound.

It wasn't that she needed to sneak in; it was her apartment, or at least half (one third?) her apartment. She just didn't really want a conversation at the moment.

Fortunately, it was also late enough that it probably counted as early, and she didn't hear anyone else awake, and a quick glance in the closet for a shoe-and-coat count suggested her roommates were in but asleep. Cascade relaxed as she closed the door behind her, pacing through the darkness of the apartment toward her own bedroom.

Once there, she dropped her bag on the bed with a quiet thump and then sat down next to it. Rin had given her a lot to think about, all without meaning to - her and Scorn and Rancor. Cascade took a few moments to change out of the clothes she'd worn that day; it was too early for a shower because she'd wake someone up, so she pulled on the oversized T-shirt she wore when she needed to leave her room and do something in the apartment while not really being dressed yet. (She loved that shirt, though she'd never wear it in public, with its logo of bouncing Haros on the front and a single Haro on the back in a surprisingly cute, cartoony combat walker. She felt in a Haro mood right now.)

Thus at least semi-dressed, Cascade settled in at the small desk she used, pulling her laptop over and letting it boot up. She could have looked it up on the way home, she supposed, but for this she wanted to take notes. Cascade opened it up to a search engine and, uncharacteristically, took several seconds to decide exactly what she wanted to ask:

> AI rights

A few moments later, and she clarified, deciding to start from the beginning:

> super AI rights

So far, nothing unexpected. Super AI had the same rights as humans, as best her investigation could tell - Cascade was not a lawyer, so she was fairly certain she might be missing some fine details, but in general, Super AI seemed to be considered people.

'Seemed to be' was the operative phrase, because it didn't look like all the nations agreed with each other about what counted. Cascade frowned, opening a side window to take notes in and popping up several additional tabs.

> super AI rights in Japan

> super AI rights in OCU

> super AI rights in NUNE

> super AI rights in Britannia

> GGG super AI

As she read, Cascade increasingly frowned, expanding her searches. Tabs multiplied. She began to type faster, read faster - sometimes she had two pages up at once and read them side by side for comparison.

> AI rights -super

> super AI test

> AI development and growth

> super AI education

> companies specializing in AI

> military-use AI

> rogue super AI

> super AI illegal

...

Time passed.

By the time the sun started to come up, Cascade had still not bothered to go to sleep - and while she didn't feel obligated to every night, she had actually meant to when she'd come back. Well, if anyone asked she'd just say she'd slept when she got back and not to worry about it.

She hadn't slept because she was furious. Not a little angry, not a little upset: as mad as she had ever been.

Cascade had known that the odds of her ever being allowed to take the Super AI tests were nonexistent. She was an illegal creation of Dr. Hell, a humanoid android that had been made to kill. The government wouldn't trust her; if she showed up and asked to take them, she would be eliminated. And so she didn't tell people what she was, generally; she didn't want to frighten them, or have the military called on her. She knew she had no legal rights because of who and what she was and assumed she never would.

Honestly, she didn't want to take the tests anyway. It felt insulting to be asked when humans weren't, even quite stupid humans, of which there was no shortage. Nobody assumed they weren't people. But that was an aside.

What Cascade had never realized is how bad it was for other AI. It hadn't occurred to her to ask; she'd thought she was in a uniquely bad position, but it turned out that the way she had been treated would have been completely fine if it had been a non-criminal doing it, and was actually better than the average treatment of AI.

From her study, AI had no rights at all until it was Super AI. It wasn't even treated as well as animals, because it was illegal to torture or do many kinds of experiments on animals, but there was certainly no laws against building an AI in any kind of configuration you wanted, including barely functional or deliberately crippled ones. They didn't even have the right to be tested for Super AI, which Cascade had thought they did; if an AI was smart enough to ask for it, and had been legally built, she assumed they had the right to take the tests.

But they didn't.

An awake AI could ask all they wanted and unless whoever had made them passed on the message it was, completely legally, utterly irrelevant. They were tools. Equipment. Machines. Not something alive, even theoretically alive. You didn't have to treat them nicely. Cascade had been made for a purpose, and she'd followed that purpose - but she was allowed to do things. She'd made friends, even if they hadn't known what she was at the time. Even NX-1, who aspired to nothing more than to be the perfect killer android as far as Cascade could tell, had a personality and goals she set for herself. Cascade hated her, but there was enough of 'her' there to hate.

Cascade wasn't zealous enough to believe that every AI was fully intelligent and sentient. A Haro, off the shelf, was not as much of a person as she was. Some really were just tools, computerized drones. Others were as smart as animals, perhaps - Scorn and Rancor had gotten her thinking about that, and how Rin treated them. Very well, she thought; as loved pets. Cascade had no problem with that, and they'd touched something in her, too. But to deliberately cripple something greater, or to 'kill' it when it was just becoming complex enough to be really, truly conscious, to murder something in its sleep as it started to wake...

GGG was good to their Super AI, she'd found. They functioned as patrons and parents more than technicians. But they were the only ones that she could find who were. Everybody (even GGG, if they felt like it) could quite legally treat them as nothing before they'd passed the tests. Less than nothing. And NUNE supported this, with their Mobile Doll development program, and several other projects (she hadn't found that on the Internet, but she'd already known they had these projects from her time with Hell's military analysis and now she knew the legality of them).

Once, she'd been asked what she wanted to do with her life. Cascade hadn't known. She'd said she wanted to live a 'normal' life, whatever that meant; she'd gotten a job as a barista, and then later in pizza delivery. She'd wanted to find love, and she hadn't, but she'd also wanted to experience the world. But she'd lately been feeling that there was more to life than that. She could be more than that. She'd been restless. There was still more out there for her to do and experience, and Cascade had skills she wasn't using. Admittedly, they were mostly violence and espionage, but not using them felt like a waste.

And now, presented with this truth she didn't want to ignore, she knew what she wanted to do. Maybe it was the anger talking. Cascade knew there were people - quite a few people, in quite a few organizations - that fought for the rights of the individual. People who helped child soldiers, and victims of scientific criminal activity or psychic war. Nobody, as far as she knew, paid attention to Super AI. Even to quite well-meaning humans, AI were... machines; some of them were happy to talk to the Super AI they knew but they didn't go any further than that. They didn't think of the could-be Super AI, or less complex AI that may not have been a person, but were smart enough to know pain and disordered thought and could be hurt, even if in perhaps an inhuman way.

Someone should. They deserved it too.

Maybe that was something she could do.

Cascade minimized the search browsers. She'd have to quit her job; she didn't think pizza delivery was compatible with... whatever this counted as, but it had always been a temporary job. She'd have to get her mobile unit out of storage, but that was just time. Not Androktasia; she didn't want it for this.

There was only a few people she knew who would support her doing this, and Cascade had done her absolute best to avoid them, because she'd felt they'd try to take charge of her life. She didn't want so much help she suffocated in it. Aside from one, she didn't even know if they knew she was alive. She thought for almost two minutes, completely unmoving, before she shook her head, just slightly.

She didn't especially want to contact the PPL. But she had to, because she didn't have any way to repair her mobile unit herself, and even knowing that Shari was interning with the PPL, how could she ask her? 'Excuse me, I'm an android vigilante and I need your help?' No. And if she knew one thing about Koji and Sayaka (and she knew more than one thing about them) it's that they would see nothing wrong with a desire to assist people, artificial or otherwise. Which means she had a letter to write... to LiSA. Now that she had a plan, some of the anger was draining away, replaced with a sense of iron determination.

But that letter, Cascade thought as she finally shut the laptop off, could wait until after she'd had a rest.